A perfectly timed slow walk from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall; a lead-lined coffin draped with the royal standard and topped with a crown, an orb and a scepter; a montage of red coats, plumed hats, high-ranking officers’ uniforms and military medals …
It is impossible to watch all the exquisite choreography surrounding the funeral rites of Queen Elizabeth II without concluding it tells us something about the country’s soul: That the British have a genius for majesty the same way that the Americans have one for big business and the Italians for la dolce vita.
The problem with this impression is that it’s nonsense. It’s true that the British monarchy stretches back to the 9th century. It’s also true that royal ceremonies make as much play as they can with “ancient traditions.” But that’s as far as it goes.
For much of its history, the British royal family was a flop when it came to the ceremonial side of things — clumsy amateurs compared with the French kings or the Habsburg emperors. The country’s ceremonial monarchy didn’t really come onto the scene until the early 20th century. Far from being the product of conservative tradition, it was the synthesized invention of three men: a journalist who dreamed up the underlying philosophy, a civil servant with a talent for theater and a king who spent most of his life waiting to ascend the throne.
The historian G.M. Young described Walter Bagehot as “the greatest Victorian” because he was the perfect embodiment of the values of the era — down to his luxuriant beard. He was certainly the greatest journalist of the era — editor of The Economist from 1861 to 1875 and author of the standard (and brilliantly readable) book on the British constitution. Bagehot’s great insight was that the British state is divided into two branches— the “efficient” branch that does the practical business of government and the “dignified” branch that embodies the majesty of the state.
The monarchy is the “dignified branch” made flesh. The royals must be permanently on parade while the real rulers hide in the shadows. They must be magnificently dressed while the real rulers wear dowdy clothes. Their most important function is to produce glorious editions of the most basic rituals of life: weddings, christenings and funerals. This not only anchors the ruling class in the rich soil of common life but also produces a wonderful distraction from the real business of statecraft.
The problem with Bagehot’s gloriously cynical vision is that the Windsors — or Saxe-Coburg-Gothas as they were before the First World War forced them to Anglicize themselves — were so bad at putting it into practice. Under Queen Victoria, Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle had all the glamor of a Scottish funeral parlor. The buildings were drab and mired in soot. The court was deadly dull — and gloried in its dullness. Anyone who wanted stardust had to take themselves to the Paris of Napoleon III. Queen Victoria rarely appeared in public for many years after her husband’s death, provoking one prankster to stick a note to the railings of Buckingham Palace proclaiming “these commanding premises to be sold or let in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.” She wore widow’s weeds for the rest of her life.
The family left court ritual to the College of Heralds, a collection of genealogy-obsessed fuddy-duddies, and various aging sinecurists, including the Master of Horse, the Lord Steward, the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl Marshall and the Master of the Stool, whose job was to examine the Queen’s excreta. Lord Salisbury, the prime minister at the end of her reign, did everything he could to escape from “the gruesomeness” of public ceremonies. The result was that the few ceremonial occasions under Victoria often involved embarrassment: marching columns that concertinaed, coffins carried the wrong way, words that were misread and ceremonies that were botched.
The job of putting majesty into the monarchy and dignity into the dignified branch fell to Reginald Brett. At first glance, he was a conventional member of the British establishment. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he served for a while as a Liberal MP before becoming a higher civil servant. But look more deeply and you’ll find a more complicated figure. Born to a French mother and married to a Belgian, he smoked rose-tinted aromatic cigarettes, had a series of romantic relationships with men and, as he matured, got into the habit of hanging around his old school, Eton, where he fell madly in love with a succession of adolescent boys. More importantly, he had a great passion for the theater.
In 1894, after Brett lost his seat in parliament, the new prime minister, Archibald Primrose, an old Eton chum, made him permanent secretary of the Office of Works, which was responsible for maintaining and decorating state buildings, including royal palaces. Brett had long argued that the royal family needed to adapt to an age that was both imperial and more democratic: He wanted it be more splendid in order to overawe the masses and more cosmopolitan in order to appeal to the people of the rest of the empire. He seized on his new position to become a friend of the royals (he bonded with Queen Victoria while he was installing a lift in Windsor Castle). That allowed him to give substance to his vision of a new monarchy.
Brett helped supervise a succession of great public events in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, former Prime Minister William Gladstone’s funeral in 1898, Victoria’s funeral in 1901 and Edward VII’s coronation in 1902. He was responsible for persuading Victoria to direct her jubilee ride through poorer neighborhoods south of the Thames. He played the leading role in reconstructing the Mall as a processional route — overcoming the objections of Victoria’s fourth daughter, Princess Louise, that the broad boulevard might become a thoroughfare for revolutionary insurrectionists. Stretching from Buckingham Palace to Admiralty Arch, it became the only part of London to match the radiating avenues of Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg, and, as such, the natural backdrop of all the most important royal events of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Brett’s emphasis was always the same. Make the royal family more splendid than it had ever been before — more than the other dynasties of Europe. He rifled through old books to find examples of court customs and interviewed aging courtiers who had memories of Queen Victoria’s 1838 coronation (14 years before his own birth). But, he complained, “The ignorance of historical precedent in men whose business it is to know is wonderful.”
The rustiness of the royal machine, however, meant that Brett’s grand plans were often poorly executed. Indeed, the grander his plans became, the more opportunities there were for cock-ups. During Victoria’s jubilee, a reception for MPs turned into a stampede, rather like a crowd being let onto the pitch after a football match, while a reception for colonial dignitaries degenerated into a bear fight, with footmen ragging the guests and outraging elderly ladies with their foul language.
Victoria’s funeral was marred by numerous faux pas: The coffin almost fell to the ground when the horses broke free of the gun carriage that carried it, and a naval honor guard pitched in to take their place. The Privy Council’s proclamation of the new king was a farce: the councillors jostled each other 10 deep, stepping on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s robe and almost pulling him backwards, and the clerk of the council, Almeric FitzRoy, ended his mumbled proclamation by shouting “God Save the Queen.”
During Edward VII’s coronation at Westminster Abbey, the myopic Archbishop of Canterbury kept getting the service wrong: His assistants had written the script in huge letters on a scroll but, when the lights dimmed, he couldn’t make out the words. After the King proceeded towards the west door, bearing the scepter and orb, the Duchess of Devonshire tried to follow him, missed her footing, fell forward heavily and rolled onto her back at the feet of a shocked courtier. Her coronet “flew off and struck the stalls” — as Brett recalls — while the Portuguese ambassador restored her to her feet.
But Brett would find his stride and help establish ceremonial perfection because of the third man in this reinventive trio: Victoria’s wayward son and heir, Edward VII himself. During his long waiting period as Prince of Wales, he had driven his mother to distraction. He was a habitue of the brothels of Paris, where a special love chair (siege d’amour) was designed for him so that he could have sex with several women at once; he stuffed himself with rich food, earning the nickname “Tum Tum”; and he surrounded himself with a “fast set” of disreputable aristocrats, plutocrats and gamblers. He nevertheless proved to be a genius when it came to putting on the royal show.
Edward was supportive from the moment Brett arrived on the royal scene. He would later install him in Windsor Castle with his own room, giving him the job of cultivating his mother’s legend as editor of her letters and keeper of the Royal archives. Edward redecorated Buckingham Palace to give it a more monarchical and less funereal feel, hiring designers with a sense of drama, replacing brown upholstery and furniture with scarlet, white and gold. Some stodgy courtiers complained that the palace increasingly resembled an opera house, or worse.
The new king was a stickler for correct deportment and proper dress. He also believed that monarchs needed to be seen in order to be believed and lived as much in public as his mother had lived in private. Edward’s life as king was whirl of carefully managed entrances and exits. The very qualities that worried Queen Victoria about her son — his taste for high living and addiction to show — made him the perfect monarch for the composer Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches, written between 1901 and 1907.
Like Tum Tum, Charles III has served a long apprenticeship as Prince of Wales; and, like his great-great grandfather, he has developed ambitious plans for reforming the monarchy. He has talked about “slimming down” the institution to remove some of the minor royals from the public eye and purse. He has also talked about making an institution that is so wedded to the Churches of England, Scotland and Wales more ecumenical. Both are good ideas, though the first will be unpopular with his relations and the second will be difficult to execute.
But Charles should beware of rethinking the ideas of the three great reformers who put the ceremony into the heart of the monarchy. The extraordinary scenes of the last few weeks — the hundreds of thousands who have queued for hours to see the royal coffin and the countless millions who have watched the ceremonials on the television — demonstrate beyond doubt that the onward march of democracy and equality has done nothing to diminish the public’s appetite for perfectly-executed pageantry.